Update on November 2013 Activities

Top News

New Partners

HathiTrust was pleased to welcome the University of Alabama as a new member in November, and, in late-breaking news, the University of Massachusetts in early December. Please see the press releases for Alabama and UMass Amherst for more information.

Executive Director Search

The Search Committee for the HathiTrust Executive Director position completed its preliminary review of applications and conducted telephone interviews with nearly a dozen top candidates. The Search Committee expects to conduct in-person interviews in January.

HTRC Call for Proposals

The HathiTrust Research Center is seeking proposals for prototyping projects to define and implement a tool or service that will help scholars better identify and select relevant resources at scale from the HathiTrust corpus and/or facilitate the construction of large-scale worksets useful for scholarly analyses. Grants of $40,000 will be offered to each of four successful respondents to be conducted over a nine-month period beginning April 2014. Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis: Prototyping Project (WCSA) is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Government Documents Initiative

HathiTrust has prepared a FAQ to accompany the recent call for US federal government documents records. The records will be used for analysis to gain a greater understanding of the total corpus of US federal government documents in support of HathiTrust’s gov docs initiative. More information is available at http://www.hathitrust.org/usgovdocs.

Nominations for User Support Working Group

The User Support Working Group is seeking nominations for 2-4 new members. This is a great opportunity to get involved in the day-to-day work of the partnership. We are seeking both staff who have expertise in providing user support, and those who have expertise in cataloging to do investigation into reports of cataloging errors we receive from users. Nominations should be submitted by January 17, 2014 via the nomination form at http://bit.ly/1f9LrAa. The form includes information about expected workload and learning opportunities.

Ingest

Validation service for locally-digitized materials

HathiTrust created a beta version of a new web-based service to validate single image files, which is available at http://bit.ly/1gvD9q7. Please feel free to try the validator and provide feedback using the form at http://bit.ly/1byxI1t. Planning and development continued on a cloud-storage-based service to validate entire volumes, scheduled for release in January.

General

HathiTrust began ingest of a set of locally-digitized AgriLife Research Bulletins (formerly the Bulletin of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station) from Texas A&M University, and completed ingest of a set of University Press of Florida backfile publications, in time to mark University Press Week. The UPF collection of materials can be viewed at http://bit.ly/1guQG1h.

Working Groups and Committees

Program Steering Committee

The Program Steering Committee is in the process of appointing a Government Documents Initiative Planning and Advisory Group and will be appointing members in the next few weeks. This is in response to one of the ballot initiatives approved at the Constitutional Convention. The PSC is also recommending allocation of funds to complete a framework for certifying the quality of individual volumes in HathiTrust, and, if approved, will appoint an advisory group to oversee this effort. The Committee continues to work on charges for a Shared Print Archive initiative, a reconstituted Collections Committee, and new initiatives regarding rights and access and metadata policy.

Projects

Copyright Review

A summary of the determinations from HathiTrust copyright review activities in November is given below. See CRMS-US and CRMS-World for further information.

November

Overall

Public Domain Determinations

All Determinations

Public Domain Determinations

All Determinations

CRMS-US

3,596

9,005

155,674

299,885

CRMS-World

2,000

5,072

41,816

79,420

Total

5,596

14,077

197,490

379,305

Government Documents Registry

The project team has updated initial use cases based on focus group feedback and drafted initial functional requirements for the registry. The team continues to analyze existing metadata records to define possible methods for identifying duplicate documents. A list of known federal agencies has been compiled and is being used to review the comprehensiveness of sources for name authority records such as VIAF and the LC Name Authority Headings.

HathiTrust Research Center

HTRC co-director Prof. Beth Plale gave a talk at Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Den Haag, Netherlands on Nov 15 on “Opportunities and Challenges of Text Mining HathiTrust Digital Library”. Text mining at scale was demoed at IEEE/ACM Supercomputing November 17-22 in Denver, and the HTRC team demonstrated text mining by dynamically deploying a Hadoop cluster onto Big Red II at Indiana University. In early November, the HTRC team held a hands-on session at Indiana University for 25 researchers from a variety of disciplines, hosted by Catalyst Center for digital humanities.

mPach

University of Michigan staff began scoping services to be offered by Michigan Publishing using the mPach platform, and considering arrangements that will need to be made to support use by HathiTrust member institutions or other organizations. To clarify the relationships between various parties potentially using mPach, the list of modules has been revised to separate Submitter from Prepper, and the diagram of the major parts of mPach has been revised to show that Submitter (the mechanism that does final validation before submitting content to HathiTrust) will be operated by Michigan Publishing.

Zephir

Partner submissions of bibliographic metadata have gone smoothly since the transition of bibliographic management from the University of Michigan to the California Digital Library’s Zephir system at the beginning of November. CDL has ingested 257,072 new or updated records through Zephir since that time. Information on submitting records to Zephir is available at http://www.hathitrust.org/bib_data_submission for an overview of the bibliographic metadata submission process.

Development Updates

HathiTrust institutions performed the following work related to applications and Web interfaces:

Development Environment

Staff completed work on web server upgrades for the HathiTrust development environment and began testing of the application codebase in preparation for subsequent upgrades to production servers.

Full-text Search

Staff continued progress to support full-text indexing of JATS content, and indexing of volumes in general into a configurable number of “chunks” to improve relevance ranking of large documents. Staff ran processes to re-index approximately 18,000 volumes affected by the bug reported in last month’s update, and approximately 5.5 million volumes whose associated metadata was affected by updates of print holdings received from partner institutions.

Image Server

Staff modified the image server for HathiTrust applications to use Unifont when embedding OCR in PDFs in cases where the language of the volume is not supported by Deja Vu Sans. This will allow more PDFs to be searchable.